Emotions and personality in coaching

Emotions are something that engineering-minded Finns absolutely love talking about. We can’t talk enough about feelings. We love sarcasm, too.

In this article Gabriella Ingman is our guide into coaching, and the main focus is to look into emotions, attitude and positive thinking in relation to success of coaching.

On the surface, Gabriella appears to be a proper Espoo resident (seaside suburb outside Helsinki), with Swedish language stronger than Finnish. However, she grew up in China, and her strongest language is probably English. She's also fluent in Mandarin. She seems to have endless positive energy for tackling challenges, and there's no organisation so troubled that she wouldn't view it through rose-coloured glasses and see something good.

Becoming a coach

Gabriella became acquainted with Scrum in 2007, and a little later, she started coaching people. Her journey as a coach started with a team with members from Finland and Poland. No one knew each other and the client expected prime results.? Technology to be used was completely new. Gabriella thought that this was an interesting challenge, practically impossible to succeed.?

The gut feeling was that it would be best to spend as much time together as possible. Even though a fresh mother, she first went to Poland to meet with people. Food is a good way to get acquainted, and she went with the team to look for good Polish food. She wanted to understand where these people come from and why they are working in a Finnish company.

The people were wonderful, smart, and empathetic, but no one knew the necessary technology so they started studying together. The Poles flew to Finland and shared a large? apartment where they studied from morning until late at night. When the project started, there was a team space at the client's premises.

At the client's, things learned the previous evening were implemented, and then they went back to the apartment to study more. Every time someone learned something, it was celebrated, and the learnings and how to get the maximum benefits from them were reviewed together.

In a perfect world the project would have been a success. It failed, but a team was born. The first project can be classified as almost a disaster, but the next one was already good. The third project was really good and the fourth was the best business project the company had ever done in terms of business.

Gabriella realised that what was needed was a sufficiently big task, but something that was still doable. It required people who had time, energy and determination. Although everyone was from different countries and backgrounds, everyone had something to offer. There was a shared feeling that this team could take on anything. After initial succees, the team did international projects in Sweden and Poland, and felt that anything was possible. Through this experience, Gabriella grew into a coach who believed that the team is magic. You don’t need? the best expertise or the best experts. You just need a destination, the will to succeed, and time.

How do a coach's personality and emotions affect coaching

Gabriella considers that coaching cannot be done anonymously, without a personal approach. Coaching requires trust, looking into each other's eyes, and feeling that with this person, I dare to leap into new things. Coaching is always work between people. Encouragement, celebrating successes, and moving things forward with whatever resources are available at that time.

Coaches are not called for when things are going well. When help is needed, there is usually an emergency. The emergency may manifest in various ways, even as anger. People also get tired and can become indifferent. In such moments, it's crucial how one relates to a person or people.

What's needed is an experienced, calm, and guiding approach. According to Gabriella, it's quickly apparent what's needed.. Sometimes it’s joy and lightness; everyday life has become heavy and something that drains people's energy. If that mood can be broken, it makes a big impact. People are empowered to change things again.

Sometimes a more invisible approach is needed, facilitation in the background. It might be better that the involved parties feel they have done everything themselves even though they are gently supported. We try to meet the client with two or even more coaches and ponder whose personality and expertise fit best for the challenge.

Ideally coaches operate in pairs, but usually only one is called in the evening and asked for insights into difficult matters. Someone is always the one who is primarily trusted. It can't be known in advance. Gabriella emphasises that a coach doesn't modify their own personality in relation to the client or task, but they can act in various ways and take different roles.?

Values guide the actions. Values are always there and they are the stable platform, no matter what the task or the challenge at hand requires. Values set the perimeter within which she can move. She can't act against her values, and if values are compromised a different coach might be a better solution.

Gabriella feels that in her? case the ability to adapt comes from international background; she has often moved to a new country and culture alone. One learns to evaluate one's behaviour and the effects of behaviour on the environment. Maybe that creates a softer approach to how to interact with people. When in Rome, do as the Romans do. All this requires understanding one's own emotions and being able to keep others' emotions separate.

Now that Gabriella has lived in one place for over 15 years, she feels a bit stiff in terms of culture. When one looks at things from the same perspective for a long time, it starts to form as normal in one's head and no longer sees that it is just one perspective among others.

As self-confidence and experience grow, there’s a risk that thoughts become entrenched. When one sees a situation, one feels they know how things should actually be. It's good to take a moment to look at things a little longer and confirm the hypotheses and biases before starting to change things.

At Reaktor, the goal is to ensure that situations in teams don't escalate into problems and that teams themselves have the ability to correct things. For example, we have Team Builder Academy, with focus on skills for taking care of one's own team. Enlightened clients may take a coach along to build a team and start a project when launching a new product or service. Gabriella's last gig was just like this. Usually, the goals are clear, but the path there is foggy. Especially at the start of a project, a systematic approach may save a lot of time and it can be an enabler for success in a? complex setting.

Coaching assignments are often related to a known problem or rather a symptom. Clients tend to have a view on the matter, but ideally we can start analysing root causes together. If client thought the matter was easy to solve, they wouldn't hire expensive consultants. It's important that everyone gets a common understanding of the current state od things. Success also requires permission to intervene in things, permission to talk about patterns that coaches recognize, permission to question, and permission to stop and think. Rush is usually a component in challenges; everyday life is so busy and full of meetings that there simply isn't time to improve the quality of way of working. Coaches' work might be to stop that rush and guide the focus back towards things valuable to the company.

Coaches teach organisations to see people's potential, but it takes time for conditions and chemistries to align. When interpersonal dynamics work regardless of the role, the organisation's work produces value and is also meaningful. Digital sector professionals are now in a wonderful position because technology is valued and there is a shortage of expertise. People can choose their workplaces and are there of their own preferences. We understand that the client's business and one's own well-being and ambitions are intertwined, and all need each other. If this synergy can be developed constructively and transparently through modern management of things, everyone can be satisfied.

Does a coach have to believe in success

An old philosophical example describes a person lost, who either believes he will be rescued or does not and either way, he is probably right. The lesson of the story is that if one believes in something, they have hope and they stubborningly do things towards suceess, and the probabilities of success significantly increase. And vice versa.

Gabriella believes that if you put yourself into it according to your own values, miracles happen. Discussion with the client and the sales situation are defining factors, and there one needs to be very sensitive. It's important to understand the logic and objectives of the assignment and whether you are speaking the same language with the client. For example, it's interesting how a client talks about people; it doesn't always feel like people are valued, and you need to get an overall idea of the company operates.?

Difficult ground is certainly recognizable, but on the other hand, corporate cultures also evolve in a more humane direction. According to Gabriella, a coach must believe in success; otherwise, it's really difficult to work at all. Coaching work takes a lot of energy, being constantly on people's skin and with difficult themes. The coach's path is not the easiest, and it requires a lot from both the coach and the people being coached.

Methods and tools are part of coaching, and for some coaches, they seem to be the content of the work. Gabriella thinks that you need to be familiar with tools and actually know a huge amount of other things to be a coach. For some coaches, expertise ends with tools and methods, but she feels it's dangerous to approach problems through defined methoids and processes. There's a certain potential for change that needs to be lured out from under the burdens of? daily life. If the available energy and enthusiasm is used to implement tools, it might even do more harm than good. If successes are not achieved, which is quite typical if the focus is on tools, the result is disappointment.

Every failed change project causes a situation where trying to initiate change next time becomes a bit harder. People have more evidence that change never works or yields results. Gabriella would be cautious about proceeding through a method change. People and objectives should be kept at the centre; people are there of their own and have succeeded also without methods.

Finnish engineering leaders or even global leadership trends often make people faceless. A macabre joke that our colleague Sami Lilja loves to tell goes that people are easiest to be lead by Excel because there one can effortlessly move people, split them to many projects and delete them. On the other hand, companies strive to get the best people to work, and super performers is very limited resource. It seems that management is also changing for the better and people learn. Whenever there's an emergency, we return to the habits of leadership behind and Excel is not part of the dicussion. When you focus on people you get support for change. We are all leaders leading things towards the goal if we have the power and motivation. f there's courage, adn we go together and think about things from another angle, then things change. When things are going well, we don't necessarily need leadership. When things aren't as rosy as hoped, that's when leadership is required.

When there's a crisis, then the leader must stand in front of their troops and be present. Someone needs to be saying, this ship is going this way and together we will get through. Now during the pandemic, Gabriella's client has had short daily meetings with people; where are we, what's happening, what do we do next? When you stop for a moment to think about what's really needed, creative thinking and leadership emerges within the team.

Planning brings us a secure and safe feeling, but that’s about the only thing it brings. In a crisis, planning is not bringing any real value because you don't know what will happen, there are way too many unknow parameters. What you can do is small pilots, think about what went well, what could go even better, what we learned, how can we make this even more impactful, and get people involved.

Encouraging coaching is an interesting topic. For example, great results have been achieved with children who suffer from learning challenges. When criticism has been completely forgotten and focus was only on successes and encouragement the kids? graduated from schools and moved forward in life. In top sports, things are often different, and sometimes coaching has negative psychological side effects.

Gabriella recalls that Dave Snowden believes that a child learns quickly through mistakes, for example, by burning fingers with matches. A mistake is made and learned from really quickly. But what does the child actually learn ? Learns to fear, learns to avoid mistakes, learns to doubt their own skill and knowledge?

When it comes to a child and matches, it’s an okay outcome that the house doesn't burn down. Gabriella understands that, but in the modern competitive world, learning through fear of mistakes leads to avoiding risk-taking and staying in safe waters, resulting fewer innovations. Corporate culture and rewarding policies also tend to celebrate people steering past mistakes, but the price could be both personal and organisational stagnation.?

People have a huge need to develop personally, and concrete development excites people. People want to be better today than they were yesterday. Positive encouragement gives a feeling that it’s happening. Coaches' work is sometimes quite invisible; we may not see it and we can't be sure how much it affected? the end result. Things might move forward with encouragement and positive feedback, but whether it helped over some mental barrier or accelerated things is hard to say precisely. Gabriella believes more in positive encouragement than in criticism or learning through mistakes.

It may be about her Chinese background, but she is very comfortable with positive feedback It's very important to remember that it must be genuine. It can't just be empty praise but honest, and very personal positive feedback.

When you can develop with support and there is time for it, it brings such rewards that usually last for the rest of life. It's very impactful. Here in Finland, she has also started to appreciate and use corrective feedback.

Corrective feedback requires very strong trust. Basic trust or predictive trust, like believing that you will come if we have agreed to meet, is not enough. It's very hard for people to admit when they don't know or understand things. They need to feel the space is safe and feel that their position in the pack is not threatened because they admit they don't understand something. When you sincerely believe that the other wants well for you it works.

In such setting it's possible to broaden the understanding of oneself and get something really impactful and valuable from it. Building such trust takes time. Without trust, if you try to promote change, you usually do more harm than promote the desired change.

Of course, if a person asks for advice themselves, the setup changes dramatically. It's a tricky skill to genuinely know how to give and receive feedback. Emotions are subjective, and one can always say if something felt bad. The fact that emotions are openly part of working life is a wonderful phenomenon of the modern age.

How many emotional retrospectives is enough

Emotional retrospectives are intended to ensure that people feel good where they are, in the team and in the company. Retrospective generally means reviewing one's own way of working and is part of agile iterative development.

In retrospect, work practices, team well-being, communication, and management of matters are examined. Emotional retrospective is the tool that is used when there are challenges with the team's dynamics.

Team’s problems can result from the team itself or from the environment. There can be a lot of stress or we work in a remote setting, which is quite common, and through that, ability to feel empathy may suffer. Stress leads to negative spirals, people start saying things a bit sharply to colleagues, and then fear emerges. People no longer dare to express their true opinions and feelings. Feedback and trust mechanisms break down.

Emotional retros do not fit very to Finnish mindset of “Management by Perkele” or “Let’s get shit done” with minimum communication. And if we talk, then it’s not about feelings. Gabriella feels that the foundation must be solid in teams. The foundation means psychological safety and a gerenl feeling that it's good to be in the team. Here at Reaktor, we rely a lot on Hackman's teachings, and team well-being can also be measured.

Is the customer satisfied? Is the team constantly developing? Are the individual's needs met? If these are in order, the team is usually doing well. Retrospective is a tool to focus and expand the thinking in relation to team dynamics. When Gabriella teaches retrospectives, she usually works with three different types of retros. One focuses on operational activity, where focus is on the? work itself and ways of working. This is the normal retro. Then there is a team bonding retro. We focus on who we are, what values we have, and from what kinds of roots our habits stem. We aim to learn to encounter each other as people. Social setting is a big part of a functioning team. Then there’s? a system-level retro with people from the outlying organisation for external challenges that the team cannot affect. It’s for a broader perspective and for correcting external things.

Reaktor aims to continuously measure the feelings in teams. We have a tool called Team Pulse. We can follow the atmosphere on a weekly basis and notice when and if things change. The team sees its own results, of course, and can react autonomously. Emotional retro is a way to find out? where the bad feelings stem from. Sometimes big personal things like a child being sick, divorce, or something really big affects an individual. An individual, in turn, is part of the team and affects the atmosphere. The life cycles of services and products also live, and it may be that the team no longer knows where it is going, and it creates uncertainty or it starts to feel that you are in the wrong place.

Gabriella wishes that people's feelings would be continuously monitored. Of course, system-level things must be in order, but we should try to ensure from as many different perspectives as possible that the team is doing as well as possible.

Sometimes it's difficult to communicate to a client that people are feeling bad. People and onsultants are hired to do a specific task or to fullfill a specific role. Gabriella recommends educating the client and to experiment. Clients can be presented with studies of the impact of motivation and feelings in relation to output and success. There could be? small experiments on the matter. Big, permanent things often scare, but small, harmless experiments and analysing the results are often welcome. Positive results should be highlighted, and maybe through them, the experiment can expand to continuous habits like a Team Pulse service continuously monitor well-being.

Emotions have naturally a major connection with the world outside work. There are plenty of worries; interest rates, a spouse may be unemployed, climate change over there, and nuclear war over here. Gabriella ponders whether it's possible for a person or a team to be balanced if the world is broken.

Gabriella believes that threats affect decision making way more than opportunities. It's part of evolution, it keeps us alive. She believes that people have basic needs, and one of them is meaningful work. She quotes her grandmother, who strongly believed that people grow through their tasks. And through their children. Through basic things.

When one's own basic needs are fullfilled and emotions are in balance, one can put focus on the family and loved ones, and spread this harmony also to team and outside world. If things are not in order this affects the team as well.? We have at the moment, for example, teams whose members are in Ukraine or Ukrainian in teams with loved ones? in the war zone. It brings enormous stress to the whole team.

Most people constantly monitor possible threats. Gabriella feels that teams should be built so that people's concerns are reacted to and everything can be discussed. The team should have? capability to survive all challenges no matter what comes up.?

There are certainly big things that can exceed the team's abilities. A difficult divorce or the death of a loved one are, of course, huge emotional crises, and it would be good to get professional help. However, Gabriella still thinks that it's very important for the team to build the basic palette so that the team can operate independently in most situations..

It helps if people are comfortable with their own values and have a basic level? emotional skills. Then things might not necessarily overflow to team in challenging. Teams also cerate their own norms, for example, how often one can be late or similar things. Norms guide actions, but of course occasional deviations are part of life. Norms are often implicit. Someone might believe that the team should be on time, but no one really is, and the individual who believes so is not doing well. It's a small thing compared to war, but it feels big to the person. Why he is on time every day even thou he leaves for work from far? Small things become big. They grow and bubble until finally, it's very difficult to work together. These individual subjective experiences affect the whole team. In that sense, the team's ability to engage in dialogue is a primary skill.

One must dare to trust others to be able to communicate openly about difficult things. Through that skill, a solution can be found. And if one brings home problems to work every day, and it disturbs work, then the team must have tools to deal with the issue.

Gabriella mentioned Hackman and Snowden during the conversation. If thinking about other reading recommendations, she likes a book about temperament by Liisa Keltikangas-J?rvinen. It's very suitable in the Finnish mentality context. Crucial Conversations is also a great book, and they have an online service to test how you would react in different situations. Through Thomas Kilmann's Conflict Mode Instrument, one can explore the nature of conflicts. They help to go deeper if the subjects interest you.